The invention relates to a data compression apparatus for data compressing a plurality of at least two digital information signals. The invention also relates to a data compression method, to a data expansion apparatus, to a transmission apparatus provided with the data compression apparatus, to a record carrier obtained with the transmission apparatus and to a receiver apparatus provided with the data expansion apparatus.
The data compression and expansion aimed at hereafter is data compression/expansion based on lossless coders, more specifically arithmetic coders/decoders.
Lossless coding using arithmetic coders has been extensively described in document F. Bruekers et al, "Improved lossless coding of 1-bit audio signals", presented at the 103rd Convention of the AES, Sep. 26-29, 1997, preprint 4563 (I-6). Further, G. G. Langdon, "An introduction to arithmetic coding", IBM J. Res. Develop., Vol, 28, pp. 135-149, March 1984 and P. G. Howard et al., "Arithmetic coding for data compression", in Proc. of the IEEE, 1994 give an extensive introduction into data compression and expansion using arithmetic coders/decoders.